Aftermath: Telecom 2012

I wrote in the beginning of the year 2012 a blog article Telecom trends for 2012 that tried to predict trends for year 2012. Now when year 2013 has started here is my aftermath how well my article predicted last year. So here are my comments on how well the predictions went. I use symbol + if prediction was was right, – if it was wrong, +- if partially right, ? if I don’t know the answer. Here are most important predictions and how they went:

Today’s Cable Guy, Upgraded and Better-Dressed article tells that the cable guy is becoming sleeker and more sophisticated, just like the televisions and computers he installs. The nearly saturated marketplace means growth for cable companies must come from all the extras

+-? Cloud service providers talk would like for the operators to have a cloud computing strategy where they would resell different cloud services. Some operators are actively selling could services to business and consumers, so not so actively. It seems that the operators’ growth at the moment seems to be more on mobile services than cloud computing. But thing can change in the future when mobile penetration increases to point that growth is not that big in there anymore.

+ There was not IPv6 Doomsday and life has been going on after IPv4 addresses run out in many places.

Operators start to pay more attention to the business opportunity of “M2M” (machine-to-machine connections). Investment and innovation in M2M (think smart energy meters and fleet trackers for logistics) will follow.

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As reported at Cablinginstall.com’s sister site, Lightwave, this year hasn’t been so bad for optical transceiver sales, earnings statements be damned, asserts the fiber-optic communications industry analysis firm LightCounting in a new report.

By the end of 2012, sales of 40/100G optical transceivers will have doubled, claims the firm. However, the analysis finds that 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules have represented the lion’s share of the market in 2012, accounting for more than 50% of sales. LightCounting says that 100 Gigabit Ethernet sales could exceed those of 10 Gigabit Ethernet devices by 2017 – provided transceiver developers succeed in creating and offering modules with smaller form factors and lower power consumption.

Together, Apple and Samsung accounted for 103 percent of mobile phone profits in 2012, a number made possible because of losses incurred by rivals Motorola, Sony and Nokia.

Apple took a commanding 69 percent of handset profits last year, more than doubling the next closest company, Samsung, which accounted for 34 percent. Together, that gave the two companies more than 100 percent of the industry’s profits, according to research released on Wednesday by Canaccord Genuity.

Sales of mobile phones has taken a downturn, says market research firm Gartner in recent statistics.

In 2012, mobile phones were sold to end-users, a total of 1.75 billion units. The drop in 2011 was 1.7 per cent.

While smartphone sales continued its growth path and rose in the last quarter of a record 207.7 million units the device. Growth in the previous year was 38.3 per cent.

Basic phones sales continued to slow. During the fourth quarter were sold 264.4 basic units, representing 19.3 per cent drop in the previous year.

The last time the global mobile phone market dipped in 2009. This year, the decline in sales was driven by the difficult economic situation, with varying consumer preferences and intense competition, Gartner suspects.

“At the moment, none of the manufacturer is not clear number three global smartphone business,”